Yahoo Inc beat Wall Street’s profit and sales expectations as spending by advertisers showed signs of life in the third quarter and as months of cost-cutting and restructuring boosted the Internet company’s bottom line.
Shares of Yahoo, the top US seller of online display ads but a distant No. 2 to Google Inc in search, jumped 5 percent after the results, which analysts said boded well for the fourth quarter, when ad spending should improve further.
Yahoo’s revenue from display advertising was much better than expected, said RBC Capital Markets analyst Ross Sandler, citing the 2 percent sequential increase in US display ad sales.
“That basically says that large Fortune 500 advertisers who want high-quality, premium inventory are going back to Yahoo more in the third quarter than they were in the first or second,” he said.
Yahoo’s net profit more than tripled year-on-year, though a big chunk of the upside came from the sale of its stake in Chinese Web site Alibaba.com (阿里巴巴).
Yahoo has undergone significant restructuring since chief executive Carol Bartz took over in January. It said in April it would lay off 5 percent of its workforce, or about 675 jobs, and it also pulled the plug on underperforming properties.
Yahoo also signed a 10-year Web search partnership with Microsoft Corp to challenge Google, a pact that US and European antitrust regulators are evaluating.
Chief financial officer Tim Morse said on a conference call that the company still believes the deal would close early next year and that they can make significant progress on integration in one or two major markets next year.
Morse said large advertisers began to spend again in the third quarter.
“I’m not going to predict when the growth rebounds, but I feel good that things are no longer on the downward trend,” he said.
Excluding traffic acquisition costs that Yahoo shares with partners, net revenue was US$1.13 billion in the third quarter, close to the average analyst forecast of US$1.12 billion.
That compared with net revenue of US$1.14 billion in the June quarter and US$1.33 billion in the year-earlier period.
Some analysts said the improvement that Yahoo experienced was a reflection of a brightening overall economic climate as much as anything else.
“Most of the benefit that they are seeing is because the economy is improving — a rising tide — not because of all the changes they’ve made,” JMP Securities analyst Sameet Sinha said.
Net income was US$187.8 million, or US$0.13 a share, in the third quarter, up from US$54.3 million, or US$0.04 per share, in the year-earlier quarter. Analysts were looking for US$0.07 per share, Thomson Reuters said.
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